a day of non-secular fasting

the start of Ramadan and Lent overlap for the first time in over 30 years

Tomorrow, two of the world’s major religions begin seasons marked by fasting. Ash Wednesday opens Lent. Ramadan begins with the sighting of the moon. Different theologies, different histories, different rituals. Yet this year they bend toward the same day, and I find that convergence moving.

We celebrated Ash Wednesday growing up, and I know the quiet shuffle forward in the line between pews. The crisp, dry press of an ash-loaded thumb against the forehead. Lent always felt serious to me in a way that other seasons did not. More than any other time of the year, it asked you to publicly declare your faith. The Lenten season asked you to show these ashes at school or work and to give up something for forty days. What strikes me, seeing it share the calendar with Ramadan, is how deeply food anchors both traditions.

In Catholicism, fasting and abstinence shape the weeks leading to Easter. You feel it in small domestic ways. The absence of meat on a Friday, the deliberation and negotiation over what counts as a real sacrifice with my parents, the parish Friday fish fry that turns restraint into gathering. Hunger, even mild hunger, becomes a reminder that desire is being kept at bay for something greater.

Ramadan orders the day around food in an even more pronounced way. The fast stretches from dawn to sunset, so the evening meal carries more weight. Your body feels the absence of food differently, and breaking the fast with your community at night must be a profound relief. There is something powerful about communal fasting that feels absent in today’s secular versions. The act of eating is better in a group, but the lack of eating may be as well. Sharing the suffering with a group of people is easier, knowing that it is worth it for eternity.

Fasting today often becomes an optimization exercise, a way of trying to live as long as possible in this lifetime rather than preparing ourselves for the next one. There are apps for fasting, continuous glucose monitors to ensure your insulin response is kept in check, and countless productivity podcasts touting its benefits. I think there is genuine science to support the healthfulness of fasting, but aside from those benefits, it can become a solitary resistance to the food system we live in.

We live in a moment where food is constant. Snacks in the car. Unlimited coffee refills. Late-night delivery. The idea that billions of people would voluntarily narrow their eating on the same day, for reasons that have nothing to do with productivity or aesthetics, feels almost subversive. It reminds me that eating has always been moral, communal, and symbolic long before it was optimized.

I do not need to collapse the differences between these traditions to notice the beauty of their overlap. It is enough to say that on this Wednesday, restraint becomes communal in two vast, distinct ways. Food is central to belief, regardless of the abstraction doctrine provides. Scripture reflects that centrality in many ways. There are over 200 references to eating in the Qur’an and well over 1,000 in the Bible. Food is to be shared and feasted upon with loved ones, and in the holiest of times, it is set aside to prepare the body for something greater.

On any given Wednesday, the world would see no difference in how to approach breakfast. But tomorrow, over a quarter of the globe will let faith choose how, when, and with whom the fast breaks.